Victory Driven By Voters Who Want Values

DALLAS — Their seeds planted 20-plus years ago by the Moral Majority, America's values voters blossomed this year into a political force that could portend a lasting Republican majority.

No longer driven to the polls primarily by abortion and school prayer, evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives focused on gay marriage but also displayed electoral clout on a geopolitical issue -- the war on terrorism -- that isn't likely to fade anytime soon.

Their message: They trust Republicans -- especially President Bush -- far more than Democrats to keep them safe, a blend of religious and geopolitical convictions that escaped many analysts before Tuesday's vote.

"That's part of how you see the City on the Hill," said Samuel Popkin, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. "Do you have a right to do it different from others or not? Is going it alone safer than working with allies or not?

"It's very much the cultural sorting that's going on in this country."

More than one in five voters Tuesday identified moral values as their No. 1 issue -- and the vast majority of them backed Bush, helped Republicans expand their congressional power and ensured landslide victories in 11 states on referendums banning same-sex marriage.

All this, despite conceding that the war in Iraq isn't going well, nor is the economy as strong as they'd like.

It reflects a new, national political reality: Hearing a sharper, more compelling GOP message, many values voters came to see Democrats as the enemies of traditional American values, godless and gay-loving and weak on defense, analysts said. "Bush offered moral clarity," said John Pitney, a political scientist at California's Claremont McKenna College. "He was much more likely to speak of right and wrong, good and evil. He was more visible in his religious conviction."

"Kerry increasingly emphasized religion toward the end of the campaign, but I don't think it quite took."

David Adams, a Democrat and history professor at Cleveland State University, described the placement of 11 state ballots on gay marriage as "a shrewd move" in increasing Bush's support. But the issue alone would not have put Bush over the top in Ohio, for instance, he said. "If the war on terrorism had not been there, Kerry would have carried Ohio," he said.

Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry did carry two states -- Oregon and Michigan -- that also passed gay marriage bans, and one observer saw a silver lining for Democrats in how "moral values" are defined.

"We have in Oregon a whole set of economic issues which many people understand to be values-based issues," said Sandra Morgen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

"It is a value to have a job that can support a family. It is a value not to have people starving. It is a value that we not have such a great degree of economic inequality. So to the extent that we see the moral context being what swayed people, what I think we need to understand is there's more to values in this country right now than gay marriage and abortion."